Saving Elijah

court, he'd win.
    The phone rang in the other room, and I heard Alex pick it up. "Oh, hi, Grandma."
    I hoped it was Sam's mother, calling from New Jersey, and not mine, calling from Long Island. Come to think of it, I wasn't anxious to speak to either. On the other hand, Sam had probably told his parents, while I hadn't mentioned it to mine.
    Alex walked into the kitchen, holding the cordless phone under his left ear and chin while he peered into the refrigerator and answered questions. I looked out the window, where the sky had clouded up, as if a storm was coming in. I tried to figure out which grandma it might be from his responses, but the answers to grandmothers' questions are pretty interchangeable. "Yeah, gonna go back to school in three weeks... Tenth grade ... Camp's great, kids are a pain ... No, I don't know ... Daddy's hasn't been here for a month, Grandma ..." He looked at me and frowned.
    "I'll take it, Alex." I had to face this sometime.
    I took the cordless and walked it out of the room, leaving Alex in the kitchen.
    "Dinah? What's wrong?"
    I sighed. "Nothing's wrong, Charlotte." Damn. "It's just that Sam and I have split up."
    "What do you mean, split up?"
    "You know, we used to be together, now we aren't. He's staying in the city."
    "That's nothing wrong?"
    "All right, Charlotte, it's something wrong." I glanced out the window into the backyard, where I'd set Elijah up with drawing materials earlier at the patio table. He wasn't there anymore. Now he was at the swing set, sitting on top of the sliding board, just staring across the lawn into the cluster of trees that separated our yard from the yard of the house on the next street. The sky had turned dark and threatening. It was going to rain buckets any second.
    "You don't have to be sarcastic, Dinah."
    My conversations with my mother were always the same. I told her to hold on a moment, and, cradling the phone under my chin, I opened the back door.
    "Elijah, come on in. It's going to rain."
    He didn't move, just sat up there, staring.
    "Elijah?" Was he in some kind of a trance or something? I put the phone down and started out the door.
    He turned and waved, then slid down and ran over. He helped me quickly clean up the paper and crayons, we got inside just as the sky opened, and I sent him into the kitchen with his brother.
    "Dinah, I was just thinking," my mother said, after Elijah had gone and I picked up the phone again. "You don't end a twenty-one-year marriage just like that. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, you know. I know you had a hard time when Elijah was sick, but you should be celebrating your good fortune."
    "Please stop telling me what I should and shouldn't do, Charlotte."
    "You're lucky you have a mother who cares enough about you to tell you anything," she snapped. "Does Sam have ..." She lowered her voice. "Someone else?"
    Of course she would think this. I told her no, and left it at that.
    Charlotte was sighing. "Oh, my, my, my. Dinah, honey. When you make a commitment to a marriage, you don't just throw it away."
    "This from a woman who discouraged my marriage in the first place."
    "My goodness, Dinah. That was so long ago. And I wasn't discouraging. I was just trying to urge you to be cautious. That's a mother's job. I love Sam."
    "I just can't talk about this right now," I said. There were tears in my voice, I knew. Hers sounded hurt.
    "But I'm your mother, Dinah. Were you ever planning on telling me?"
    "I was going to, it only happened a few weeks ago. It's just—I just don't want to talk about it."
    "Fine, Dinah. You call me when you do." And she hung up.
    So. This—like Elijah's illness, like my wedding, like everything—had turned into something about her.
    I stood there for a moment, then replaced the phone in its cradle.
    "What did Grandma say?" Trying desperately not to care, Alex didn't look up from the newspaper on the kitchen table when I came into the kitchen. Outside, it was night at mid-afternoon, sheets of rain spilling out of a wild sky and slamming against the window. Elijah was sitting on the counter, watching.
    I sighed. "She was..." My mind raced through various word choices— freaked, mad, upset, appalled, full of reproach, full of advice—and settled on the neutral word so often used by shrinks. "Concerned."
    Alex's earring flashed when he nodded, and he still didn't look up. His hair hung in his eyes.
    "Look, honey, I know you're upset—" I waited through a near-deafening boom of